I have a friend who recoiled from kissing her young daughter on the lips. I was incredulous. Planting a smacker right on baby’s mouth is one of the visceral pleasures of having an infant.

But here’s actress Alicia Silverstone taking that pucker to a whole new level. She’s given new meaning to the phrase “eats like a bird” in a video she posted on her blog that depicts the vegan star feeding Bear Blu, her son born last May, much like a mother bird feeds her chicks. She takes a bite of food — in this case, a very Asian-inspired bite of miso soup, collards, radish and daikon along with some mochi wrapped in nori — crunches and munches, then transfers it to Bear mouth-to-mouth. Jezebel informs us that this technique is also referred to as “kiss-feeding”:

…And if it looks like Silverstone and her son are making out in the video, it’s because “kiss-feeding” is believed to have evolved into French kissing over time. The similarities to making out are what makes mouth-to-mouth feeding a child weird-looking. And this:

“He literally crawls across the room to attack my mouth if I’m eating.”

One commenter on Jezebel didn’t think the practice was strange or repulsive in the slightest:

This is the way you make baby food in places without Wegmans. Gerber isn’t available everywhere and this is how babies learn to eat solid food where you can’t push your trolley through aisle upon aisle of corn and soybean derivatives.

Hmmm…she’s got a point there. Come to think of it, using my choppers used to be my preferred way of cutting big chunks of food — a hunk of cheese, for example — into bite-sized pieces when my kids were too young to bite off an appropriately sized portion and too oblivious to think it was gross. I can’t recall ever actually mashing up their food for them, however. That’s what forks are for.